Not Even Past

by Tina Whittle

Driving to the Chickamauga Battlefield National Park feels like a return as much as it does a pilgrimage. My great-great-grandfather on my daddy's side wore the Confederate gray here. Eventually, he chased General Sherman's troops all the way to Savannah before he took an artillery ball in the leg, got captured, and was released at the war's conclusion to walk home from North Carolina back to middle Georgia.

I wish I knew why he took up arms, what motivated him to fight for the Confederacy. I have read enough letters from Civil War soldiers to know that their motives were various and often complicated, but I have no such letters from him. His military record shows him reporting for duty days after his eighteenth birthday. Was he an eager volunteer? Or was he conscripted, forced by the Home Guard to fight under penalty of death? Was he a true believer in this doomed terrible cause? Or was he a poor farmer caught up in a rich man's war?

Monument to Wilder's Brigade

I have no idea. And I have no way of asking him, not even at Chickamauga, a place that carried the dust of his feet one hundred and fifty-six years ago. Our family records are equally unhelpful on the subject. This green land near Chickamauga Creek surely knows the truth of him. But it's not telling either.

The National Park Service sums up the battle thusly: "The Battle of Chickamauga [left in its wake] a broken Union army and 35,000 men killed, wounded, missing, or captured. The victorious Confederates controlled the field, and soon followed the Union Army to Chattanooga and prepared to lay siege….The Union army may have lost the Battle of Chickamauga, but they won control of Chattanooga and threw open the gateway…. As one Confederate soldier ominously wrote after the fighting, 'This...is the death-knell of the Confederacy.'"

After learning how the battle progressed at Chickamauga, I could look at the grass and forest and farmland with a martial eye. High ground and low ground, one good for defense and hunkering down, the other good for the long view, for the calculated offensive. But it takes effort on my part. I have the historical play by play, so I know how the fighting progressed—here the back-and-forth skirmishing in the woods, there the drive through an unguarded hole in the middle of the ranks.

But on this most recent June day, sunny and mild, it was a picnic spot.

Years ago I visited Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day of fighting between North and South. It was summer then too, and I was struck by the contrast between the rich, natural beauty of the present riddled with reminders of its brutal and bloody past. I wrote of that feeling:

"Half-gone. We are all half gone. It aches to see that, so clear and unavoidable, the promise of eventual extinction burning as bright as the rippling sunlight on the water. And what came of this crucible I'm standing in, this battlefield, this bloody beautiful cauldron? The United States, of course. The Battle of Antietam ended in a draw, but the war marched on to its conclusion. We stand now on that conclusion. It is living land, and changes beneath our feet, but a hundred and fifty years later, it's still supporting us, for better or worse."

View at 85 feet, from the top of Wilder's Brigade monument

I have toured many battlefields since then. And I always think of the metaphysical idea that time is a human construct, and that as such, everything that has ever happened is happening right now, still happening. I think memorials and monuments are our clumsy way of reminding ourselves of this. Former battlefields bring us back to the center of the thing. And then we go from there, as fallible in our understanding as ever, constructing an idea from grass and pictures and words carved in granite.

Historian Shelby Foote says that before this war, the United States was plural, as in, "The United States are." Afterward, it became singular. The Civil War, he says, made an is of us.

May our singular us-ness continue to prevail. 

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.